Queen's Road: Seemingly abandoned by friends and family on her birthday, Ariane (the director Robert Guédiguian's lifelong partner and muse, Ariane Ascaride), leaves her suburban apartment.
She winds up, without her money or her phone, in a picturesque restaurant by the sea, run by the gruff but also very amiable Denis (Gerard Meylan).
The restaurant caters to an elderly clientele who are lured in by a young man Raphael (Adrien Jolivet) who befriends Ariane. An angel always on the lookout to help someone, Ariane finds her calling when she soon gets herself a job at Denis' restaurant. She waits tables and makes friends as she goes along.
Her newfound freedom makes her forget her husband and the children, who failed to show up on her birthday.
Forgetting the past, she soon immerses herself in the lives of the people around her. She sleeps on Denis' boat that docks just off the shore where it gently rocks her to sleep and in the day time goes about trying to make people's lives better.
And these motley characters include Jack, a writer who fancies himself to be American and passes to Chekov's work as his own, a nightwatchman who howls like a hurt wolf every night, and Lola, a prostitute who is also young Raphael's girl friend. The fantastic Jean-Pierre Darrousin plays a cab driver as well as the role of a depressed theatre director.
Guédiguian, who for the last three decades, has made films deeply steeped in the social reality of the French working class, deviates a little into the realm of magic realism with Ariane's Thread.
A fantastical representation of working class camaraderie, the film meanders from one setting to another, and the viewer much like Ariane herself, must let go and enjoy the flow of things.
So when Ariane suddenly starts having an intense conversation with a talking turtle, we must not be surprised. Or when the crew decides to steal into a museum and steal baby ocean creatures preserved in bottles of formaldehyde and then go ahead and dump it into an ocean, the audience needn't feel too incredulous.
The dream-like episodes are filled with a nonchalant humour and a deep sense of belonging that instantly lift one's mood and that's where the movie finally succeeds.
And even if working-class solidarity is merely a dream nowadays in France, it is a dream with very deep roots (as attested to by the Dardenne brothers’ beautiful Two Days, One Night, which also played at the film festival).
While the film's ending somehow feels like an unnecessary cop-out, this two- hour-long movie comes as much-needed comfort at the end of a long day at the festival.
Catch the next screening of Ariane's Thread at 12.45 pm, at Fun Cinemas (Cunningham Road), Screen 3, on Thursday.